Analytics

The stakeholders of a digital enterprise make important decisions based on the data residing in multiple databases, and repositories containing structured and unstructured data, which are pruned via multiple business rules.

Digital Platform Solutions

eTouch enhances the digital presence of a leading virtualization and cloud software provider with a consolidated search engine and integration of enterprise applications

The client is a leading software company that reduces IT infrastructure complexities for its customers by providing virtualization and cloud services. Their technologies and products span the areas of cloud infrastructure, data centers, desktop and application virtualization, networking security, storage availability, enterprise mobility management, and hyper-converged infrastructures.

Challenges

The client offers products and services for enterprises as well as end consumers. They cater to business as well as technical audiences looking for production collateral and technical solutions. The client’s website holds a wide range of content, from marketing collateral to technical white papers. They needed to revamp their digital presence with a comprehensive search engine that provided accurate, relevant information. Challenges toward this included:

Multiple product master data residing in multiple systems

The need for a unified, enterprise-wide information taxonomy

Limited content metadata

The need to consolidate multiple search engines

Lack of a mechanism to leverage social media content and feedback

Limited faceted navigation capabilities; the client wanted to provide incremental search and browse functionality so users could begin with classic keyword search and then scan the result list

The need for a unified solution for multiple business units such as marketing and support services

The Solution

Drawing on their expertise in providing innovative, customized solutions, eTouch delivered a master taxonomy for the entire organization that was implemented across multiple systems. These included the client's marketing portal, customer portal, and global support services among others. To ensure users saw relevant content, eTouch added accurate, consistent metadata to the client's content using Natural Language Processing (NLP). They consolidated their search engines and data repositories into one platform — Google Search Appliance (GSA) - for improved search relevance. eTouch streamlined the classification process for over 2 million assets and 100 GB of content including marketing collateral, technical documentation, knowledge management systems, community pages, and data from social media such as Facebook and YouTube. eTouch integrated 10+ enterprise applications including content management, collaboration, forums, knowledge management, social networking, and database applications among others.

Benefits

eTouch's understanding of the client’s requirements, and their search enhancement interventions, resulted in the following benefits for the client:

Multiple search applications integrated into a single search engine

A more meaningful information architecture for increased search efficiency and relevance

A unified enterprise taxonomy (~600 unique nodes) across multiple applications and business units

The client is a not-for-profit global alliance of 24 leading telecom operators, focused on creating a unified, open platform for cross-operator and cross-device mobile application development. Their mission is to build a standard platform for mobile services, create a number of client-powered mobile application storefronts, and unlock the full value of Mobile Network Operators' (MNO) networks.

The client had launched a range of tools to encourage innovation among mobile developers globally. These included a common mobile widgets specification; easy-to-use developer kits; and an online repository, distribution, and payment mechanism to help developers roll out their products to customers in 70+ countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

Challenges

In their effort to help developers build cross-operator, cross-device, mobile application platforms, the client launched a range of mobile services for the developer community. They needed a set of portals that would:

Accelerate the pace of application innovation

Allow developers across the globe to access developer kits for mobile applications

Integrate with client-provisioned app stores as well as payment and settlement apps

Allow developers to more easily monetize applications across platforms and technologies through cross-operator billing services

Allow mobile operators to administer and provide support services to developers and consumers

Support multiple languages for app development

The Solution

eTouch developed a multi-locale set of portals including a developer portal, an end-user portal, and an operator portal, based on the open source Liferay portal. These enabled developers to download platform SDKs for developing applications that run on multiple devices & multiple operator networks, uploading these mobile apps across multiple storefronts, and with support for diverse payment applications. In the first year of release, over 30,000 unique visitors downloaded developer kit and developer portal had over 20,000 users with 3000+ mobile apps uploaded.

All of the portal's functionalities were accessible from a single interface. eTouch also delivered an end-user portal, an operator admin portal, and a customer service portal to help the developer and consumer communities.

Benefits

With eTouch's open source portal solution, the client saw the following benefits:

Reduced costs by 50% for self-service portals

A single-interface for mobile networks to distribute applications to their app storefronts, and charge users for digital merchandise via their operator bills

Challenges

While rebranding their product and service portfolio, and expanding into new market segments, the client wanted to modernize their online presence. This included the need to:

Organize and structure their web content, which was being served from a legacy platform and multiple Content Management Systems

Migrate over 2 million assets to a robust, integrated platform after cleansing redundant and obsolete data

Enable multilingual content in over 12 languages with distributed ownership on an integrated web portal

Classify content into enterprise wide taxonomy

Improve content accessibility and the search experience for visitors

Offer website visitors a rich online experience with multi-channel support

The Solution

Based on a 13-year relationship, the client chose eTouch as their partner in modernizing their site. Using their established migration framework, eTouch seamlessly migrated the client's over 2 millions assets from their existing Interwoven CMS repository to the new Documentum 5 platform. The client's global marketing website was published in 70 countries in over 12 languages.

eTouch designed and proposed a new taxonomy to ensure content classification was in line with the demands of content creators as well as consumers. The existing content was classified in the enterprise wide taxonomy using natural language processing (NLP). eTouch also implemented their new search platform FAST and optimized search relevance by implementing SEO best practices and a unified search strategy across disparate data sources. eTouch enhanced the search experience with guided navigation, contextual and faceted search, advanced multilingual indexing, and rich media indexing.

A global team of digital content experts and engineers planned and successfully completed the modernization project over 18 months.

The client owns and operates some of the world's most popular websites, which are used by more than a billion users worldwide. These websites run on the world's most advanced global network of data centers. The client is viewed as a benchmark of innovation in the digital information space.

Challenges

The client had been using a proprietary third-party application for most of their network planning and deployment processes, as well as inventory tracking. They faced multiple issues in using the application efficiently. The data used by the application resided on a myriad of applications and spreadsheets, with a majority on personnel's desktops. Not only did this setup pose a significant security risk, it also was not scalable with respect to the growth of data centers and their assets. Synchronizing data across multiple desktops entailed significant overheads.

The client had standardized processes and software for internal engineering functions. Interoperability between network and internal infrastructure was key to the success of a solution that would address these challenges.

The Solution

The client chose eTouch to architect and build a solution that would alleviate their issues with the third-party application, and at the same time lay a foundation for the application to keep pace with the growth of their infrastructure. With this mandate, the engineering team from eTouch implemented a solution that seamlessly integrated the third-party application with the client's infrastructure and DevOps processes, provided structured data integration pipelines, and added features that enabled forecasting, planning, and analytics. The application was developed in Python on Google AppEngine. The primary drivers for the choice of programming language were:

Reusability of code, since many of the common functions had already been developed within the organization

Better integration with the organization's back-office functions

Availability and scalability characteristics built into the platform

Over time, the solution evolved to reduce dependencies on the third-party application. Most of its functions were being served over the client's private cloud infrastructure, which in turn helped reduce costs by leveraging the availability and redundancy SLAs of the private cloud.

eTouch continues to be an essential partner of the client's network teams — rolling out new features on a regular basis, and expanding the footprint of the application to other groups in the client's organization.

Benefits

With the custom solution from eTouch, the client was able to use a single system to manage network infrastructure, forecast and plan for growth, and receive information abstracted to — and meaningful for — all levels of the organization. Considering the application's architecture, functionalities, and ease of use, the client implemented it across all of their network planning, deployment, and inventory tracking processes.

The client is a $4.15 billion global provider of financial, accounting, tax preparation, and online payment solutions. Their products and on-demand banking services are used by small and medium-sized businesses, professionals, mid-market banks, credit unions, and individuals. With their connected services offerings, they have made their products and solutions available across all major digital channels. The client has positively impacted the lives of more than 50 million people.

Challenges

The client wanted to revamp their marketing efforts. Toward this, they needed to:

Integrate their existing e-commerce platform with their marketing initiatives. This would empower digital marketers to plan, design, and launch campaigns that drive demand and increase brand engagement across digital channels

Gain insights into customer behavior and purchase history so marketers could make informed decisions about product offerings. They only had a custom tool with limited capabilities for customer behavior and campaign analytics

Reduce delays in launching and managing campaigns. With a single legacy platform for both content and campaign management, and no segregation of roles in content and code creation, marketers had to rely on the web development team to create content and campaigns — which led to delays

Reduce development time, and testing delays and defects

Scale projects and teams as needed

The Solution

eTouch architected a new robust e-commerce platform that could handle a load of millions of visitors per month. It replaced the client's expensive e-commerce solution with an open source platform built on Ruby on Rails. For content and campaign management, eTouch implemented Adobe AEM, which enabled the client's business teams to author their own content and manage their own campaigns. eTouch also integrated SiteSpect for multivariate testing, Ensighten for tag management and Adobe Analytics for web analysis. The platform reduced campaign's TCO by 30-40% and time to market over 50% by providing self services and process governance.

eTouch introduced web performance benchmarking to handle payloads across locations. They also introduced an open source testing framework to automate 90% of test cases, along with a multi-variant testing tool to analyze user behavior, conversion patterns, and feedback on web properties.

Their marketing team responded faster to customer demands, which improved lead generation for the sales team

Reduced time-to-market with the Adobe AEM implementation

Improved page load times by up to 66%

Real-time connectivity of projects and resources in real-time with the dashboard solution, which also provided a direct measure of project performance

eTouch helped the client establish a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) to manage and govern testing tools and processes. The move toward a cohesive online marketing platform with integration of ecommerce and content management solutions was a phenomenal success in the US. This has been replicated in Australia, Canada, India, and the UK.

Conclusion

eTouch's competency in digital engineering helped the client meet their online customers' needs better. The client transformed the way they interacted with their customers and sold their products. Best-in-class web and test engineering services from eTouch enabled them to focus on creating a next-generation online platform for their products and services.

eTouch designs, develops, manages, and supports all public and internal web applications for space agency

The client is the world's largest aeronautics and space agency, responsible for the civilian space programs as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. The client focuses on areas like aeronautics, human exploration and operations, science to explore the earth, solar system and universe, and space technology. Their strategic goals are:

Expand the frontiers of knowledge, capabilities, and opportunities in space

Improve understanding of the earth and develop technologies to improve the quality of life on our home planet

Serve the American public and accomplish their mission by effectively managing the people, technical
capabilities, and infrastructure

Challenges

Being a civilian agency, the client wanted a powerful way to generate public interest in their endeavors, while being prudent stewards of Federal tax dollars and assets. They needed to revamp their "online presence" to better serve general citizens, and manage their resources and internal communication more efficiently. The objective was to provide an agency-wide capability to create, maintain and manage public web sites and ancillary services. Those services will include content management and delivery, search, support for multimedia, collaborations with blogs and wikis, portals, platform for hosting, etc. The key requirements were:

A single point of "online" entry for citizens to access public information assets

Support for millions of concurrent users with 99.995 percent availability and 24x7 support for each day of the entire calendar year

A seamless IT infrastructure for agency-wide collaboration

Significant reduction in operating costs and complexity in managing IT services

A mobile app with full Boolean search for 150,000 images, a full-fledged radio streaming feature, and live streaming of their public TV channel

A Facebook-like social network for their 80,000 personnel

An Integrated portal of disparate repositories like CMS's, databases, and file systems

A hybrid cloud environment to host their intranet, with compliance to security standards including FISMA High/Moderate, SAS 70, FIPS, and FedRAMP

The Solution

eTouch designed and developed the agency's primary public web portal, and integrated the most popular social media and social networking sites into the portal. This involved a cached content delivery network, interventions in operations of two enterprise-scale data centers, implementation of an agency-wide CMS, and full integration of the agency's public content. eTouch built the platform to meet NASA's SLA requirements like:

Support for 25,000 TPS (Transactions per Second) at the origin servers - The site will utilize a CDN; traffic at the CDN typically is 150,000 TPS for large events. 25,000 TPS flows through to the origin servers

700K+ web content (pages/files in repository)

Varying page sizes - For instance the NASA home page is 250 KB (Text/HTML), post Gzip compression it is ~34 KB, associated content for the NASA home page is an additional 2900 KB

Working with limited metadata, eTouch designed an intranet portal and a single CMS repository for more than three million assets including 500,000 webpages. For the intranet portal, eTouch used open source platforms like Liferay and Alfresco, and commercial products such as Google Search Appliance to improve search relevance. The portal merged more than 10 enterprise applications for content management, forums, knowledge management, and databases. eTouch migrated thousands of resources to the new portal, using an agency-wide taxonomy to classify assets.

eTouch also created an enterprise-wide community portal, Spacebook, which is based on Liferay portal technology. They migrated all the content of the client's community from their existing intranet portal to Spacebook. For robust and secure access to the agency's applications, eTouch implemented a security platform with centralized authentication, including secure multi-level authentication, for diverse application types.

They also planned, managed, executed, and monitored infrastructure activities for the Agency Modernization Program. The team delivered value-added, innovative enterprise technology solutions, including hardware, software, shared applications and data, and security, that were integrated into the agency's modernized infrastructure.

Benefits

For the agency, the engagement with eTouch resulted in:

Improved accessibility for the public and effective connectivity in near real-time with the public

Improved current system, updated technology and implementation of industry best practices

Improved agility in adoption of tools and implementation of services

Efficient connectivity among engineering personnel, with their 3500+ sites accessible from a single portal

End-to-end knowledge management solution

Seamless collaboration and social networking among 80,000 employees across 13 centers

Protection for more than 3000 federated applications

Savings of over $1 million per year with the migration to a hybrid cloud

Awards

eTouch has won four Webby awards, a Golden Montreux award, a Civil Servant Contractor award for Best Managed Application, and numerous group achievement awards.

Challenges

The client's customers have a large number of IT applications, databases, third-party applications, and infrastructure components — all on legacy platform & programming languages predominantly PHP. The current team was not able to scale as new business features and existing bugs kept pilling up. Client also didn't have dedicated project management and quality assurance teams. The client wanted to outsource development, testing and management of all IT applications and teams. They wanted to flexibility in ramping up and down team size based on the current utilization and load besides setting up industry best practices in agile methodology and quality processes. The client wanted to outsources IT services that would:

Refresh the existing technology stack to include new technologies and innovations

Support multiple platforms and programming languages

Augment development, testing and project management team

Clear all existing 800+ bugs in defect tracking system

Ramp up/down the team as per project needs

New trained resources within short duration

Implement agile methodologies for project management

The Solution

eTouch's deep understanding of the hi-tech industry, and their record of innovation in digital engineering, led the client to partner with them. eTouch helped client scale their current team with additional onsite and offshore resources. It implemented scrum based project methodology and testing techniques. eTouch designed and implemented a scalable platform in Java and NodeJS to support migration of existing application and building new applications. eTouch also supported migration of existing legacy CMS platform to new Adobe AEM to enable client to integrate new marketing automation tools.

Benefits

With the implementation of new platform and project outsourcing to eTouch, the client benefited from:

Implemented a new platform using Java and Node technologies

Augment development, testing and project management team

Cleared over 400+ bugs in defect tracking system in very short duration

Provided new trained resources within short duration on existing applications and domain knowledge

Implemented agile methodologies for project management

Implemented new QA processes

One of the world's largest online advertising companies turns to eTouch to revamp their legacy applications for product promotion, content creation, and customers' ad campaign implementation

Synonymous with information organization, search, and access, the client's products and services are used by more than a billion users worldwide. Their portfolio includes 150+ diverse offerings, from search and ads to email, cloud storage, and a mobile operating system. The client is viewed as a benchmark of innovation in the digital information space.

Challenges

One of the client's flagship services helps website monetization by placing targeted ads on partner sites. The client's application for this service had a robust ad campaign engine, but insufficient features. Similarly, for creation of their own product promotion content, the client was using a legacy process. Content approvals were conducted over email. The client needed to:

Reduce customers' ad campaign launch times

Allow their marketing team to use the ad campaign application independent of support from the engineering team

Streamline the approval process for the customers' product promotion content

Shorten the product promotion cycle and reduce process errors

The Solution

The client chose eTouch as their partner to engineer new, efficient systems for their ad campaign service and their product promotion activities. eTouch re-architected most of the ad campaign application, while reusing the ad campaign engine. eTouch built a dynamic contextual learning system with a distributed highly available architecture. The eTouch team incorporated analytics for the client's customers to track the success of their campaigns. The application was developed in Python that afforded better integration with the back-end processes, and also helped leverage some of the common functions that had already been developed. Scalability was an important factor since the application was project to receive millions of page-views per day.

To streamline the client's product promotion cycle, eTouch conceptualized and built a web application that integrates with language translation APIs and generates promotion content in 130 languages. It streamlines the approval process through a custom workflow engine. The solution's capabilities include search functionality, geo-targeting of content, reporting, and cross-domain communication.

Benefits

With eTouch's solutions, the client saw the following benefits:

Reduced time for customers' ad campaign implementation from 3 weeks to 1 day

Eliminated the need for their engineering team to support the ad campaign application

Improved customer satisfaction because of reduced campaign launch times and the availability of analytics data

Reduced time for the client's product promotion cycle — from 6 weeks to 2 days

Improved collaboration between global and local marketing and sales teams

Improved product branding

A revenue increase of more than $1 bn

Conclusion

eTouch continues to be an integral partner for the client's product engineering teams. The eTouch team supports the ad campaign and product promotion applications, and delivers new features on a regular basis — which help shape upcoming iterations.

One of the world's largest web search companies uses eTouch's digital test engineering solution for multiple product and update releases

Synonymous with information organization, search, and access, the client's products and services are used by more than a billion users worldwide. Their portfolio includes 150+ diverse offerings, from search and email to cloud storage, a web browser, and a mobile operating system. The client is viewed as a benchmark of innovation in the digital information space.

Challenges

The client regularly launches products across geographies and product categories. Updates to their software offerings see multiple changes in functionality and user interface. The client needed:

An end-to-end automated testing platform to manage their product and services portfolio including their browser, online store, social media site, and mobile operating system

A testing methodology that would allow for continuous requirement changes in the testing phase

Expert personnel to manage all of the testing and integration of their tools and services

When eTouch was tasked with taking over the quality assurance function for these products, key challenges for eTouch included:

Daily product releases resulted in a short timeframe for test cycles

Faster testing to allow for multiple test iterations

Qualification of product releases on a plethora of devices and operating systems

Increasing the footprint of automated testing in a rapid release environment

The Solution

eTouch created a robust, automated test engineering solution for several of the client's projects, primarily using open source technologies. The solution was supplemented by a team of experienced personnel for manual testing. In collaboration with stakeholders in the client's organization, eTouch streamlined processes, provided objective guidelines for the determination of bug categories and priorities, and worked hand-in-hand with the engineering and User Experience teams to manage the full build and release cycles.

Benefits

eTouch's testing methodology resulted in the following benefits for the client:

An efficient, automated testing platform manages multiple projects

Automation of 30% of test cases for time savings and improved efficiency

Detection of more than 99% of bugs

Significant improvements in regression test coverage, with a 100% increase in the number of bugs detected before public releases of the products

Reduced emergency pushes and disruptions for the product engineering team

A billing model that was tied directly to the value being delivered by the testing teams. Over the years, this model has been a testament to our expertise in the test engineering space, and has reaffirmed the value that eTouch as a vendor can deliver to its clients.

Automation of a significant section of test cases with custom-built tools using C++ and Java, with capabilities in-built to provide metrics for test iterations

A single provider that provided testing on all mobile and desktop platforms, including Android, iOS, Linux, MS Windows, Mac OSX et al.

Conclusion

eTouch continues to be a key partner for the client's product engineering teams. The eTouch team delivers detailed bug reports that helps the client with near bug-free, on-time launch of new product versions.

Client Testimonials

"eTouch was our choice because of its experience on our technologies and flexible engagement model"